'Merrily We Roll Along' is Sondheim's wisdom on life pushing us forward

By Chris Jones

Chicago Tribune|

Jan 31, 2018 | 3:05 PM

Neala Barron, Jim DeSelm and Matt Crowle sing “Old Friends” from “Merrily We Roll Along" accompaniment by Aaron Benham. See the Porchlight Music Theatre show at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts (Roger Morales / Chicago Tribune)

I met an out-of-town friend for a drink after the Porchlight Music Theatre production of “Merrily We Roll Along” on Tuesday night. “Where would you like to go?” he asked, meeting me in the lobby.

I thought for a second. “If I am being totally honest,” I said, “to another production of ‘Merrily We Roll Along.’ ” He laughed, sensing I was still in the show.

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That impulse did not flow from having watched a poor production of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim musical, a show that follows show-business lives, professional and personal, through the device of traveling backward in time. Director Michael Weber’s Porchlight production is actually quite good; it sits very smugly within the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. With its shallow auditorium and large proscenium stage, this a far better set of digs for this small professional company than the black boxes of old.

Weber’s interpretation can be visually fussy and doesn’t ever range stark and dark enough for me, but let’s stipulate that the trajectory into the abyss is impossibly wide and deep with this particular musical, a meditation on bitterness and division with an emphasis on the inevitability thereof.

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If you wanted to sum up the ironically titled show, being as few of us roll along with constant merriment, you could do worse than use a snippet of dialogue between two of the central characters.

Franklin (here, Jim DeSelm) is a gifted composer who likes money and to whom compromise and accommodation to rich patrons and the demands of the marketplace starts to come easily. Charley (Matt Crowle) is a gifted lyricist who believes in art and to whom compromise and accommodation to rich patrons and the demands of the marketplace never comes easily.

The show’s point — made over and over in some of Sondheim’s most devastating lyrics — is that life beats the nice out of you, especially a life in an overcrowded profession where your opportunity is someone else’s loss. This long has been a show loved by creative types for just that reason. I once watched Sondheim at an event attended by pushy, well-to-do folks who wanted to talk to him and in whom he had absolutely no interest: all of his decades of upset and frustration at that perennial requirement of the artist’s life under capitalism was emptied directly into this music and these lyrics. This is a takedown of backers, producers, board members, sycophantic socialites, hangers-on, hangers-off, and, yes, he reserves a special place in his hell for critics.

But Sondheim and bookwriter George Furth extend that theme into relationships and marriages. That’s the real sting of “Merrily” for most people. In one of the most devastating moments in all of Sondheim, Franklin’s estranged wife, Beth, sings “Not a Day Goes By” in the anteroom of a court, a kid screaming to see his father as he is pulled away by his mother. And Aja Wiltshire pulls off a chill. Mostly.

Since the show goes backward, Sondheim and Furth also can show us how the little truisms and charming mannerisms we enjoy in youth go sour as we age and grow bitter. In marriages, they can perpetuate intergenerational dysfunction. Yet even with these not-so-good things going on, “Merrily” still merrily rolls along, life offering no other choice.

The last time I saw this show in a small Chicago-area theater, no less than Jessie Mueller was playing Mary, the third wheel to these two self-obsessed guys. Here, Neala Barron, always an actress willing to play the long game, offers a very competitive interpretation. At times — many times — the show not only sounds great, but it really goes where it needs to go. Keely Vasquez, who plays the thanklessly detestable Gussie Carnegie (the name says it all), delivers far more than this object of Sondheim hatred usually delivers. In the lead, DeSelm has both a charming voice and a Dorian Gray quality that carries him along, partway down the path. But he has yet to really stare down his demons, as this piece demands.

“Merrily’ contains many of Sondheim’s greatest songs: “Good Thing Going,” “Our Time,” “Old Friends” and so on. The satirical elements, the aforementioned claques, are harder to stage. In this show, some of them work well — there is a lot of talent in the very ample ensemble — but a few feel overplayed. They need truly rigorous attention to truth in a theater this small.

So. Recommended, Sondheim devotees. Much to enjoy, a few things to kvetch about.

But here’s why I was ready to start over. We are in a moment of acute awareness of how everything really can just come crashing down, with past selfishness and sinning destroying professional accomplishment, fame, fortune, artistry. This show asks you whether anybody then will be rolling along at your side.